Early life and education Pasaribu was born in the village of Siborong-borong,
North Sumatra,
Dutch East Indies on 21 May 1915. He was born into an upper class
Batak family; his father, Mangaradja Salomon Pasaribu, was a government official (assistant ). It was during his time in those schools that he was exposed more broadly to Western Classical music from his Dutch teachers and took violin and piano lessons.) He also received music instruction from a number of musicians during this period, studying piano under Willy van Swers, cello and piano with Joan Giessens in Bandung, and cello with
Nicolai Varvolomeyev in Batavia; at this time there were many expatriate European musicians living in Java. He was also fascinated by languages and later claimed to have learned Russian, Tagalog, Spanish, Japanese, and other languages from working musicians during that era. In 1936 he had saved enough and left for
Tokyo, enrolling in the
Musashino Academia Musicae, where he studied piano and cello for three years; he seems to have been the first Indonesian classical musician to study abroad. At that time non-European classical musicians were quite rare. From 1949 onwards he also played cello in a new fully Indonesian orchestra headed by Varvolomeyev, the . In September 1950 he founded the League of Composers (), an organization that would protect copyrighted compositions, but relaunched it in December 1950 as the Indonesian Musician's Union (), which at its start had around 80 members. Having lost his ability compose and perform at a national level, he turned to education and curriculum development and worked extensively for the
Ministry of Education. He had been advocating since the 1940s for more support for the fine arts and the development of a more rigorous musical education system as it existed in European countries. In August 1953 he became chair of a new organization in Jakarta, the (Indonesian Music Society) which aimed at supporting that development. In early 1954 he was also member of a committee which aimed to develop Jakarta as a center of culture; other members included the novelist
Pramoedya Ananta Toer, the painter
Henk Ngantung, and the poet
Asrul Sani. In 1954 he traveled to
Beijing as a Ministry representative to study Chinese music and opera and to do research for the opening of a fine arts institute. Upon his return to Indonesia in the same year, he became director of a Ministry of Education music school (, SMINDO) in
Yogyakarta. He also regularly contributed to other literary magazines in the 1950s, including
Zénith and . He continued to travel abroad to do research and build connections for the fine arts institutions. He then became an instructor of music education in a new Ministry of Education institution in Jakarta which became the Jakarta Institute of Teaching and Education (IKIP Jakarta) in 1965 (now part of the
State University of Jakarta). During that time he was associated with
LEKRA, the
Communist-affiliated cultural organization, and was friends with prominent members such as
Sitor Situmorang and
Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
Time in Surinam In 1968, following the
Transition to the New Order and the banning of LEKRA, and possibly for economic reasons, he left Indonesia for
Surinam, which at that time was still a part of the Netherlands. After that time his reputation and popularity declined greatly in Indonesia, and he mostly ceased composing. He later said that he had lost faith in the music world in Indonesia and the direction it had been taking. He became a piano and cello teacher at the Suriname Cultural Center and after 1975 became a private piano teacher in
Paramaribo as well as a cellist and conductor for the Paramaribo Symphony Orchestra. He also worked as a translator and occasional speechwriter for the Indonesian embassy in Surinam. It was in 1986 that he published his critical work (Analysis of Indonesian music), after having not published any new books since the 1950s.
Retirement and return to Indonesia He returned to Indonesia in 1996, settling in
Medan,
North Sumatra and becoming an importer of Czech pianos. Amir Pasaribu died at the age of 94 in Medan on 10 February 2010. ==Legacy==